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Around the world in eight days

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

On the face of it, my journey had the appeal of a forced march — or an episode of the hit reality show The Amazing Race.

Inspired by next week's 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death, I lopped a zero off the number in his classic novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. I girdled the globe in only eight: eight countries in eight time zones, crossing through 24. A total of 19,393 air miles, 354 car miles and 213 train miles. Sure, adventurer Steve Fossett took just 67 hours and change to make this month's record-setting solo flight, but he didn't stop. My travel time was even less, including just over 45 hours on airplanes ... in coach.

But while no globe trotter in his or her right, un-jetlagged mind would duplicate my whirlwind trip, I wouldn't trade a nanosecond. Despite spending anywhere from nine to 26 hours per pit stop, I returned with more than passport stamps and a body clock gone haywire. I captured an iconic experience in each place — and came away with a lifetime of memories. Here is the story of my eight-day romp.

Central Park: My journey begins at Christo's gates.

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

DAY 1: NEW YORK TO HONG KONG

'The Gates' to adventure: Critics are hailing Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude's 16-day creation The Gates as the century's first great art event. Locals and tourists adore the 7,500 contraptions and their billowing saffron banners. And I, coming from D.C. and faced with schedule-snarling predictions of a major storm, almost miss them.

But the forecast fizzles, and the JFK AirTrain whisks me to Manhattan with enough time to stroll a sliver of Central Park's snow-covered, gate-lined walkways with a mother and son who have flown in from San Francisco to be part of history.

We reminisce about Christo's bad karma in California's Tejon Pass, where a bystander was killed when high winds yanked one of the yellow umbrellas out of its temporary moorings in 1991. Then we embrace the moment — and The Gates as a metaphor for travel.

"Their short life spans create a preciousness and an urgency, encouraging us to bear witness and drink in the art as much as we can, while we can," Christo's Web site notes. "Years after every physical trace has been removed and the materials recycled, original visitors can still see and feel them in their minds when they return to the sites."

DAY 2: ARRIVAL IN HONG KONG

By Katharina Hesse, Getty

After flying more than 15 hours, Hong Kong's harbor is my reward.

Long day's journey into a Hong Kong night: There is something mystical about awakening from a contorted, oxygen-starved sleep, well into a voyage that will hurtle you halfway around the world in about 16 hours, to discover you are soaring somewhere near Ulan Bator — one of those places on the map that tugs insistently at a nomad's heart.

But Ulan Bator will have to wait. Tonight is Hong Kong, with its stabbing lights, breathtakingly vertical lines and first-time visitor Ryan Kuzn, 27, whom I meet on the Airport Express train. A lapsed mechanical engineer from Seattle, he's a month into an extended round-the-world passage. I give him advice on a cheap place to stay (Kowloon's Salisbury YMCA, which has $37-a-night dorm rooms as well as my $127 nightly digs), and he gives me a travel story in return.

He was on the deck of a live-aboard dive boat, anchored along Australia's Great Barrier Reef. "There was the sweet smell of the air, and the sound of waves breaking all around, and a meteor and lightning storm above. That moment was worth everything I'd paid for my trip, and I've still got seven months to go."

I have fewer than seven days. Still, I have accomplished one of my biggest goals: establishing those instant, share-your-passion connections that only travelers can make.

DAY 3: HONG KONG TO NEW DELHI

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Boat bargain afloat: Hong Kong's Star Ferry

An exercise in frugality, tai chi, plus a boat ride: Body clock spinning madly five hours before my 8 a.m. tai chi chuan lesson, I soak in the views from my 16th-floor room overlooking Victoria Harbor — a classic postcard vista for which I'm paying a fraction of the price paid by my next-door neighbors at the Peninsula Hotel.

The frugality theme continues at tai chi class, a free, four-times-a-week offering of Hong Kong's tourist board. Here, I admire master William Ng's fluid moves and stumble through a few "white crane flaps its wings" of my own. Neither Ng nor his students expect we'll balance much yin and yang today, considering it takes at least 10 to 15 hours to learn the ancient martial art's basic patterns. But it's an ideal way to establish a timeless sense of place and culture — and meet new friends, flight attendants on a two-day layover from Newark.

Armed with the Chinese address of Tung Wah Eastern Hospital, I grab a cab to join their acupuncture session. (I'm a little late, thanks to getting sidetracked at what looked like the hospital's respiratory ward, complete with alarming posters about avian flu.)

Then, before heading back to the airport, I take what has to be the planet's cheapest, most spectacular boat ride: the 25-cent Star Ferry, which has plied the harbor since 1898.

DAY 4: NEW DELHI AND AGRA

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

The moonlight tour was a dud, but the Taj Mahal lives up to its hype.

Unforgettable sights, sounds: "You have to take India for everything it's got," says Samantha Natraj, the vibrant assistant sales manager at Agra's cocoon-like Amarvilas hotel. And apart from an hour at her luxe Taj-view oasis, I'm trying to follow that prescription.

Impressions from my 26-hour sojourn: The odor that assaults as I walk off the plane, akin to dirty socks festering in a gym locker. The bloodied paws and matted fur of a trained bear, yanked to attention for a few hoped-for but not-received rupees at a border crossing on the 4½-hour drive from New Delhi to Agra. The "Horn, Please" sign on a mangled truck bumper in a country where most drivers are only too happy to comply.

The Taj Mahal, that transcendent monument to an emperor's love, is seared into my consciousness from the minute I spot it. My moonlight tour (tours have just resumed after a 21-year, security-related ban) is a bust, thanks in part to rifle-toting guards who make TSA agents look like movie ushers. But I'll never forget the play of sun on its marble floors, smooth as an ice rink.

Or Natraj's own favorite memory of this miraculous country: the smell of "red mud after the first rain of the monsoon. Ask anyone from India. They'll get goose bumps just thinking of it."

DAY 5: NEW DELHI TO DUBAI AND CAIRO

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Dubai's camel races: A taste of what's to come.

Land of camel milk and honey: "Imagine Donald Trump deciding to build a monument to excess and hiring Salvador Dalí to design it," tour operator Ken Fish writes in a recent blog, "and you have an idea of how insane this building is."

This would be Dubai's Burj al Arab, one of the world's tallest — and arguably most lavish — hotels. Rooms start at $1,200 a night, but mere mortals pay $40 for a breakfast that includes such we're-not-at-Denny's-anymore items as camel milk (heavy and sweet, said to be more nutritious than the cow variety) and honeycomb from Yemen.

I'm a guest of Lorraine Ludman, an affable Englishwoman I met through Journeywoman.com. On a rare rainy day, she and a few expat pals (among the 80% of the city's 1.2 million residents who come from somewhere else) give me a breakneck tour of the Las Vegas of the Middle East, complete with roadside banners plugging The Apprentice but minus casinos and in-your-face prostitutes. We drive past Dubai's regular Friday camel races, saddled with rumors of conscripted jockeys as young as 5.

I hold out for a ride on my own camel, in Cairo. But the apex of my after-dark stopover is that city's oldest coffeehouse, El Fishaway. It's a tourist trap by day, but tonight I'm surrounded by locals — and smiles of welcome.

DAY 6: CAIRO TO PARIS

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Paris at my feet from the Eiffel Tower.

A Verne-like view of Paris: It's a long way from an 8-cent falafel sandwich and a few tokes of an apple-scented sheesha (water pipe) in Cairo to the rarefied air of Paris' Le Jules Verne restaurant. Here, some 400 feet above the city in the Eiffel Tower, broad-shouldered men in starched shirts and bare-shouldered women in glam gowns ogle Notre Dame while nibbling rillettes de canard (fatty duck) and listening to a piano rendition of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.

I'm about five months too late to have gotten a reservation this Saturday night, but my budget won't allow it, anyway. Thanks to the robust euro, an evening meal costs about $170 a head. The woman in a garish U.S.-flag sweater notwithstanding, Americans are a relative rarity at Le Jules Verne these days.

Instead, I listen to maitre d' Christophe Deseaux wax poetic about high-altitude marriage proposals (he hears at least one a week, and the answer is always "yes") and the Eiffel Tower's spiritual connection to Verne. Though the French visionary had nothing to do with the monument, he might as well have, Deseaux argues.

"I remember reading a lot of Verne as a kid," he says. "His books are a wonderful escape: You don't move, but he makes you travel."

DAY 7: PARIS TO LONDON TO REYKJAVIK

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

My Holy Grail: London's Reform Club.

Following in the footsteps of 'Eighty Days' hero Phileas Fogg: Amtrak, eat your heart out. My coach-class jaunt to London via Eurostar is a delight — complete with gratis champagne and hot towels, delivered precisely as the train emerges from the Chunnel that runs below the English Channel.

It's a good omen for the rest of the day, which includes a pilgrimage to Pall Mall's Reform Club, built in 1841. Around the World in Eighty Days' fictional hero, Phileas Fogg, started and ended his race from the steps of this private "gentlemen's club," and though women have been members for the past 24 years, the imposing edifice retains its air of tweedy, restrained masculinity.

From politicians to poets, members have always been the "movers and shakers of their day," Coldrick says. They include former prime minister Charles Earl Grey, whose namesake tea I sip at the nearby Ritz's gilded Palm Court. So call me a hayseed Yank, but for $65, I'd almost expect the scones to be gilded, too.

DAY 8: REYKJAVIK TO WASHINGTON, D.C.

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Brr it's cold! Chilling out at Iceland's Blue Lagoon spa.

An icy-hot massage brings home the 'reality of my adventures': This much I know: I might return to Iceland, but I will never get another $120, in-the-water massage at the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa that uses the effluent from a neighboring power plant.

It is administered on a cloudless morning when the water-to-air temperature differential hovers around 105 degrees and a howling wind slices my mud-caked face like a razor blade. And it is a masochistic exercise for both shivering client and stoic masseuse, a chapped-lipped, wetsuit-wearing unfortunate who puts the lie to the legend that every Icelandic woman is gorgeous.

But The Gates served as the ideal portal to a magical week. And the raw, searing drama of this land and its quirky populace ("given local style, food and culture, nobody is stranger than an Icelander," notes the current edition of Icelandair's in-flight magazine) make for the perfect, symbolic ending to my whirlwind journey.

Consider these prophetic words from Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. It's the tale of an eccentric German professor, his nephew and a local guide who plunged into a dormant crater of Iceland's Snæfellsjökull glacier, descending toward the core of the planet and a world they could never have imagined.

"Looking back to all that has occurred to me since that eventful day," Verne writes, "I am scarcely able to believe in the reality of my adventures. They were truly so wonderful that even now I am bewildered when I think of them."